Category Archives: Business Value

[Since first writing this article in January 2018, I’ve concluded that Ethereum is not capable of being a platform for Tokenizing Every Little Thing. Ethereum is a one-trick pony x 1500 when it comes to creating large-scale decentralized applications (i.e. Ethereum/Solidity smart contracts are best for creating single, simple entities like alt-coins). Checkout slide 56 of this presentation: NEO Blockchain Vancouver 20180315 Meetup. The NEO Blockchain and NEO Smart Economy is the best available 3rd generation distributed application platform on the planet and improving every day. Michael Herman, March 17, 2018]

Move beyond digitalization of the enterprise to graphitization of the enterprise.

For 2018 and beyond, the challenge is simpler but more difficult:

Tokenize Every Little Thing (ELT)

To provide more context, let me first quote from the introductory paragraphs of the #Graphitization article.

Here’s a great diagram that explains this concept [graphitization]. (click on the diagram to enlarge it)

Figure 1. The New Model of IT

Graphitization of not only all of your corporate information assets across all of your constituencies and stakeholders – at the data, application entity, and business object level – but also the graphitization of all of the interconnections between every business process, application system, infrastructure component, cloud service, vendor/service provider, and business role that uses, manages, or stores corporate information (Crossing the EA Chasm: Automating Enterprise Architecture Modeling #2).

Use graphitization to make your existing corporate information more available, more usable, and more informative. Graphitization enables you to “Keep Calm and Have IT Your Way“.

What is #Graphitization?

#Graphitization is a data science and enterprise architecture-inspired framework and process model for modeling, ingesting, organizing, analyzing, and visualizing any domain of endeavor by using graphs – networks of connected objects and relationships with each object and relationship annotated with additional descriptive information (metadata).

Why #Tokenization?

Given the burgeoning preoccupation of the world’s business, finance, government, and technology sectors with blockchain technologies, cryptocurrencies, and token-this and token-that, the buzzword for 2018 will be #Tokenization …the creation of tokens (multiple versions of tokens) to represent every thing on the planet …Every Little Thing (ELT).

While individuals, startups and larger organizations are trying to dream up the next big, one-off, token or crytocurrency, why not just admit that, “in the end”, everything will be represented by a token?

Why try to knock these off one at a time (e.g. Bitcoins, Ethers, altcoins, CryptoKitties, letters of credit, auctions, escrow agreements, electronic health records (EHR), electronic medical records (EMR), etc.) when the ultimate goal to to create a universal interconnected graph of ELT (Every Little Thing) in the universe?

Why #graphitize the enterprise when you can #tokenize the universe?

What is #Tokenization?

Let’s get a little computer-sciency for just a minute. A common task to to take an input stream (a string of characters, a stream of data, a data file or database table), analysis it, and convert it into a collection or sequence of higher-level tokens for further analysis (a process that can be applied recursively). Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia…

In computer science, lexical analysis, lexing or tokenization is the process of converting a sequence of characters (such as in a computer program or web page) into a sequence of tokens (strings with an assigned and thus identified meaning). A program that performs lexical analysis may be termed a lexer, tokenizer, or scanner… [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_analysis]

Coming up for air… Why not represent ELT that happens in the universe as a stream of blockchain transactions?

the events in your life?

everything that occurs during a Presidential election?

the 24-hour cycle of one day changing into the next?

the activity-by-activity and task-by-task execution of a business process?

a stream of events from your Internet-of-Things (IoT) enabled car, toaster or refrigerator?

Jim Gray and TerraServer

In one of his several presentations on Scalable Computing (circa 1999), Jim Gray (relational database pioneer and Turing Award winner) describes the TerraServer project in the following way:

[Users navigate] an ‘almost seamless’ image of earth.

SkyServer was a similar project quarterbacked by Gray:

TerraServer allowed access to newly-available satellite imagery with resolution of 1.5 meters/pixel. SkyServer, a collaboration with Alexander Szalay and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins, allowed access to astronomical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. SkyServer led to additional work with astronomical data, … [https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/gray_3649936.cfm]

Tokenize Every Little Thing

With the advent of blockchain technologies (in particular, the Ethereum extensible blockchain platform), why can’t we embark on a grander mission to tokenize Every Little Thing? …and including all token-pair relationships (TPRs).

What will it take?

What needs to change in the Ethereum blockchain platform? Will Ethereum be able to scale to support modeling, ingesting, organizing, analyzing, and visualizing of Every Little Thing (ELT)?

Gordon Bell, MyLifeBits MSR Project (early 2000’s). I remember Jim Gray telling this story but I had trouble finding a proper reference because I thought it was Gray’s story instead of Bell’s. I now know better but I’ve already finished the above article. A Wikipedia MyLifeBits reference can be found here. YouTube videos can be found here, here, and others over here. Channel 9 videos: Part 1 and Part 2. Computerworld article (2008). Business Inside article (2016).

Appendix A – Amazon Leadership Principles (and Subprinciples) contains an ArchiMate enterprise architecture model that depicts the (and then decomposes) the 14 Amazon Leadership Principles into multiple levels of subprinciples. Scroll down to the bottom of this article to check it out.
NOTE: The underlining in Appendix A attempts to highlight the individual Subprinciples and Relationships found in the text description of each of the 14 Principles.

The first real section Amazon Leadership Principles, Core Entities, and Relationships presents a new innovative way to learn, remember, understand, and apply the Amazon Leadership Principles as highly visual web (or mesh or graph) of principles, concrete entities, abstract entities, and relationships.

The last section (just before Appendix A), entitled Personal Leadership Principle Maps, depicts how the experiences and accomplishments of one person’s career (mine) can be (formally) mapped the Amazon Leadership Principles.

Let’s start the journey. If you’re not familiar with the Principles, start by reading:

Appendix B – Amazon Leadership Principles; then

Appendix A – Amazon Leadership Principles (and Subprinciples)

All of the figures in this article represent different graphitized views of the Amazon Leadership Principles (click here) …all built from a single underlying graph model (which, in total, is referred to as the #Graphitization of the Amazon Leadership Principles).

The existence, enablement, creation and/or execution of each group of relationships gives rise to (or realizes) one or more of the 14 Principles (and/or their Subprinciples). When these realization relationships are added to the Core Entities depicted in Figure 1, Figure 2., the “Complete Model”, is the result. (Click to enlarge.)

To simplify the understanding of the model, 14 new views were created – one for each of the 14 Principles – each overlayed on the original Core Model (Figure 1). Figure 3 is an example drawn from one of these 14 views: Principle 1. Customer Obsession.

So far, we’ve addressed the “what” of the Amazon Leadership Principles depicted as a #Graphitization model projected as a number of different views.

In the next section, the Amazon Leadership Principles are used as a framework for cataloging one’s lifetime experiences and accomplishments. Personal Leadership Principle Maps is an Amazon Leadership Principles application – it’s the Amazon Leadership Principles put into action.

Personal Leadership Principle Maps

Have you been living an Amazon Leadership Principled career/faith/life?

Figure 5. is a copy of my Personal Leadership Principle Map (PLPM).

ArchiMate Assessment entities are used to model specific experiences and accomplishments.

ArchiMate Outcome entities are used to model specific evidence, learnings, or proof that one has been able to apply the specific principle in their career, faith and/or life.

In my case, for Principle 7. Insist on the Highest Standards, I have specific experiences related to the recent Toronto Salesforce 2017 Tour, working at Parallelspace Corporation, the IBM Canada Toronto Software Lab, and at Microsoft.

Specific evidence includes:

Parallelspace trust framework (Relationships-Reputation-Trust)

Working as an ISO-9000 Quality Analyst and a certified Quality Assurance Auditor

A concept I call focusing on the success of an Individual Individual

Various and diverse experiences working for Microsoft as a full-time employee (blue badge) and as a Microsoft partner

Next Steps for Iteration 2

Possible next steps include:

Federation of Personal Leadership Principle Maps – at the Employee Team, business unit, or Organization level to discover the aggregates collective experiences and accomplishments for the purpose of rebalancing hiring objectives (Principle Gap Analysis), accumulating customer as well as competitive intelligence, etc. to support Customer Obsession, Ownership, Invent and Simplify, etc. goals and objectives. Identifying the best sources of experiences and accomplishments for specific Principles based on a Team’s or Organization’s previous roles, education, or training.

Use of both the Core Model and the Complete Model as well as the Federate Personal Leadership Principle Maps to create a graph database repository to real-time query analysis and visualization (e.g. using the Neo4j graph database).

Appendix B – Amazon Leadership Principles

The underlining attempts to highlight the individual Subprinciples and Relationships found in the text description of each of the 14 Principles.

Leadership Principles

Our Leadership Principles aren’t just a pretty inspirational wall hanging. These Principles work hard, just like we do. Amazonians use them, every day, whether they’re discussing ideas for new projects, deciding on the best solution for a customer’s problem, or interviewing candidates. It’s just one of the things that make Amazon peculiar.

Customer Obsession (1)

Leaders start with the customer and work backward. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Ownership (2)

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job”.

Invent and Simplify (3)

Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here”. As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.

Are Right, A Lot (4)

Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.

Learn and Be Curious (5)

Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.

Hire and Develop the Best (6)

Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.

Insist on the Highest Standards (7)

Leaders have relentlessly high standards – many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver high-qualityproducts, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

Think Big (8)

Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.

Bias for Action (9)

Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.

Frugality (10)

Accomplish more with less. Constraints breedresourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

Earn Trust (11)

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

Dive Deep (12)

Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit (13)

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

Deliver Results (14)

Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

Table 1. Proposed List of Verbs to Augment or Replace
the Current ArchiMate 3.0 Relationship Names

An interesting observation: Note the verbs that start with “Is*”. They appear in either the “Source-Target” (ForwardVerb) or the “Target-Source” (ReverseVerb) columns but not both for a given relationship. This wasn’t deliberate – this is just the way it turned out. Does this indicate anything about which direction is the natural direction for the relationship to point to?

What do you think of this proposal? Please post a comment below, email me, or post a reply in the LinkedIn ArchiMate group.

To learn more about the background and history of this proposal, check out:

This article is the second in a series on #Graphitization. Click here to explore the other articles in this series.

Background

Ray Dalio is Chairman & Chief Investment Officer at Bridgewater Associates, L.P., the world’s largest hedge fund, and is well known for The Principles that he and his colleagues at Bridgewater use to govern themselves and each other. Mr. Dalio has published the 200+ Principles in a 123-page document and made the content publically available on a dedicated website: Principles by Ray Dalio (“The Principles”). Here is his description of The Principles…

“What is written here is just my understanding of what it takes: my most fundamental life principles, my approach to getting what I want, and my “management principles,” which are based on those foundations. Taken together, these principles are meant to paint a picture of a process for the systematic pursuit of truth and excellence and for the rewards that accompany this pursuit. I put them in writing for people to consider in order to help Bridgewater and the people I care about most.”

#Graphitization is a data science and enterprise architecture framework and process model for modeling, ingesting, organizing, analyzing, and visualizing any domain of endeavor by using graphs – networks of connected objects and relationships with each object and relationship annotated with additional descriptive information (metadata).

The primary applications of #Graphitization are:

System optimization,

Systems life cycle management, and

Transformative Change in resulting in positive increases in business value for the system being studied.

A system is defined as any collection of strategies, system components, assets, architectures or processes.

That is, why not try to turn The Principles into a computer model that documents each Principle, its hierarchical inter-relationships, and, via some sophisticated cloud-based text analysis services, visualize all of the important interconnections based on a set of computer-chosen key phrases?

This article documents Iteration 1 of the #Graphitization of Ray Dalio’s Principles.

Wisdom in, Wisdom out

Today, there are several easy-to-use technologies that enable developers to view web pages as sophisticated databases. The Principles website (a single web page) is no exception.

A simple query like the one below makes it is easy to exact the hierarchy of Sections, Topics, Principles, Subprinciples, Summary Paragraphs, Questions, Bullets, Figures, etc. from The Principles using a single statement.

Figure 1. The Principles Web Page Query

A sample portion of The Principles web page appears below and has the following structure:

“To Get The Culture Right…” is a Section. There are 4 Sections at the top level of the Publication.

“TRUST IN TRUTH” is a Topic and it is also a numbered Principle.

“Realize that you have nothing to fear from truth.” is a numbered Principle.

Topics, Principles, and Subprinciples are numbered sequentially; there is no hierarchical numbering scheme.

Figure 2. Web Page Sample: The Principles By Ray Dalio

In my ModelMate model for The Principles, 3 classes of key phrases are used to cross-index each Topic, Principle, Subprinciple, etc.

Key Topics – short phrases deemed to be particularly relevant and interesting across the entire document (i.e. the corpus)

Key Phrases – short phrases deemed to be of particular importance within the scope of a single title, paragraph of text, question, or bullet.

Other Phrases – additional key phrases chosen because they are particularly relevant to Bridgewater, Mr. Dalio, and The Principles.

In total, there are 2470 key phases; about 200 of these are Key Topics selected by a cloud-based text analytics service, about 300 are Other Phases. The remaining Key Phrases (with a few overlaps) were selected by a different text analytics service that was run against the text of each individual Topic, Principle, Subprinciple, etc.

A sample of the ingested The Principles web page content looks like the following (click to enlarge):

Figure 3. Ingested Web Page

Results of Iteration 1

The entire structure and content of The Principles was ingested during Iteration 1 of this project:

The sample queries below highlight The Principles that are related to 2 critically important concepts at Bridgewater: “radically” and “transparent” (including all words that have these words as reasonable root words).

The single line queries found all artifacts that were in some way related to the 2 key phases; then calculated the traceability up to through to the top (beginning) of The Principles (click to enlarge).

Figure 4. All Topics, Principles, Subprinciples, etc. with Traceability to the Key Phases “radically” and “transparent”

The large orange dot represents the top (the root of the web page). The large blue dots represent the 4 top-level Sections in The Principles:

Figure 5 (below) includes some exploration (expansion) of Principal 2. Realize that you have nothing to fear from truth.

Figure 5. Principal 2. Realize that you have nothing to fear from truth.

Conclusions

In the end, extending the ModelMate platform to support the above produced more learning than what I’ve been able to glean from subsequent exploration of the #Graphitization of The Principles. Perhaps someone with more familiarity with The Principles can contact me with some interesting use cases. I’m extremely curious to derive more value from this model

This work on this project was made infinitely easier through the use of the ModelMate platform (powered by the Neo4j graph database).

This article describes the architecture reference model for deploying a comprehensive, integrated enterprise architecture modeling and data science platform based on ModelMate.

The audience for this article is IT professionals including enterprise architects, solution architects, and security architects who want increased visibility into the deployment of their custom applications, entire data center environments, business process definitions, and LOB applications such as SAP, Oracle Financials, Salesforce, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

A primary use case is organizations with a requirement to move one or more on-premise applications or capabilities to the cloud or need a better understanding of how their hybrid on-premise/cloud environments (e.g. Salesforce cloud applications and on-premise or third-party customer loyalty solutions).

ModelMate

Quoting from Crossing the EA Chasm: Open Repository Strategies for Enterprise Architecture, “ModelMate is a working implementation of a Microsoft SQL Server and Neo4j graph database-based repository for managing arbitrarily large collections of arbitrary entities, properties, relationships, views, etc.to enable analysis, visualization, and understanding using easily-available open source and COTS (commercial off the shelf) business intelligence (BI), data visualization, and machine learning (ML) platforms, tools and cloud services.”

The primary goal of ModelMate is to provide automated support for the Continuous Transformation Framework of the Progressive Enterprise Architecture Model (PEAM) depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Progressive Enterprise Architecture Model

Continuous Transformation Framework

The Continuous Transformation Framework is a Deming Cycle based on the following 4 phases:

Listening & Learning

Knowledge > New Designs

Plan & Act

Transformative Change > New Outcomes

The Framework is depicted as a continuous cycle as shown in Figure 1 above. The Framework can also be flattened and presented as a (repeating) sequence of 4 processes (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Continuous Transformation Framework

Why all of this discussion about PEAM and the Continuous Transformation Framework? It is because to be able to understand and value the ModelMate Architecture Reference Model, it’s important to understand the class of problems it is trying to solve. Automated support for Continuous Transformation is the pain; ModelMate is the pain killer.

ModelMate Architecture Reference Model

There are 3 high-level layers in the ModelMate Architecture Reference Model:

Apps that use the ModelMate repository

Continuous Transformation Framework

ModelMate Open Hybrid Repository (MOHR)

These 3 layers (and 4 categories of apps) are illustrated in Figure 3. Each app category corresponds to one phase in the Continuous Transformation Framework.

Figure 3. ModelMate Architecture Reference Model: 3 Layers

The choice of apps that your organization selects for each category depends on the medium-term and long-term drivers and goals for your enterprise architecture program. The app groups map to specific phases of the Framework:

Listen & Learn phase

Ingestion

Knowledge > New Designs phase

Pure Modeling and Layout apps

Modeling, Layout & Visualization apps

Data Science apps

Custom Mobile and Web apps

Plan & Act phase

Program & Project Management apps

Transformative Change > New Outcomes phase

Operations and Change Management apps

Figure 4 lists a sample or representative list of applications that can fulfill the needs of each app category (each phase of the Continuous Transformation Framework).

Figure 4. ModelMate Architecture Reference Model: Apps

Ingestion

Ingestion apps are responsible for scanning the enterprise’s operational environment: systems, assets, and processes. Information captured about each entity includes its structure, metadata, performance and usage data. Operational business data is usually not needed and not captured.

These are inbound data sources used to automatically update and maintain the EA models stored in ModelMate. Ingestion apps are the primary data sources for the Listen & Learn phase of the Continuous Transformation Framework.

Pure Modeling and Layout Apps

There are several types of apps that comprise the Knowledge > New Designs phase of the Framework. Pure Modeling and Layout Apps are applications that support the manual modeling of entities, relationships, and metadata as well as the manual layout of stakeholder specific views.

The apps in the group do not support any built-in analysis and visualization capabilities beyond manually-created basic views. In addition, pure modeling and layout apps do not include an end-user scripting capability for performing automated, user-defined custom analysis or visualization.

Archi is an example of a pure modeling and layout app.

Modeling, Layout & Visualization Apps

These types of apps support manual modeling of entities, relationships and metadata and the manual layout of stakeholder specific views but also include basic, advanced, and/or custom analysis and visualization capabilities.

BiZZdesign Enterprise Studio and other advanced EA modelers are examples of apps that belong to the Modeling, Layout & Visual Apps group – supporting the needs of the Knowledge > New Designs phase of the Framework.

This is the last group of apps that support the Knowledge > New Designs phase of the Framework and includes both no-code and code platforms for creating custom reporting, analysis, visualization apps.

No-code custom apps designed with Microsoft PowerApps (and Microsoft PowerFlow) are examples of the former; traditional C#/VB.Net, Java, and Node.js/JavaScript apps are examples of the latter.

Program & Project Management Apps

Program & Project Management Apps support the Plan & Act phase of the Framework.

Traditional portfolio, program, and project managements apps are examples of applications in this group. Collaboration tools such as Microsoft SharePoint, Confluence, and Jira can also belong in this group. Collaboration tools can also be considered as “horizontal” solutions that can be used across all phases of the Framework.

Operations and Change Management Apps

All of the effort to create and manage a functioning enterprise architecture solution only realizes direct business value when it leads to Transformative Changes being made in the enterprise’s strategies, systems, assets, and processes; and measurable, positive New Outcomes result from the changes.

Examples of apps in this category include change management applications that support IT Service Management (ITSM) disciplines such as ITIL. ServiceNow is an example of an ITSM app.

Enterprise architecture and other tools and methods don’t generate business value – plain and simple; at least, not direct business value. This applies to many categories of enterprise software including but not limited to:

At best, these tools and methods can enable or aid in the creation of increased business value. This is actually pretty simple (in hindsight).

Real business value is only realized when an organization’s operational strategies, systems, assets, and processes experience measurable, positive Transformative Change – whether enabled by the use of a particular tool or method; or not.

Here’s the diagram… (click on any of these figures to enlarge them)

Figure 1. Enterprise Architecture Management

Here is some additional information on the ModelMate Continuous Transformation Framework as well as where and how business value is created.

Figure 2a. Continuous Transformation Framework

Figure 2b. Continuous Transformation Framework

Figure 2c. Continuous Transformation Framework

Here’s a more recent elaboration on the Continuous Transformation Framework described above.

Figure 3. Continuous Transformation Framework (updated)

The articles below go further to identify and define the gap that exists between the enterprise architecture reference model for the organization and the organization’s operational systems, assets and processes as the Enterprise Architecture Chasm. (Similarly, there is a gap between the strategy and reality is called the Strategy Chasm).